Everything in Brazil's modern culture it seems is celebrated with an exclamation point. And the current show at YBCA promises just that: "originality of the culture of people who live in the tropics." Here, the Tropicaìlia art movement is loudly explored, portraying a uniquely Brazilian art culture. I was, however, left reeling not from the surprise of innovation but by the bold, dizzying colors and the overwhelming aroma of coconut and suntan oil (actual smells!). More cloying were the smells of different bowls in one exhibit, where the viewer is invited to sample the flavors of colors, a task as arbitrary as the names of colors themselves. It’s a psychological exercise: substituting one sense or impression for the other. In hypnosis, they actually assign colors to numbers for a similar purpose, and although this is an exciting concept, in the age of Purell and swine flu, it's better in theory than practice.

Flavors are also invited into the gallery through Rivane Neuenschwander’s photographs and video installation of ingredients manipulated into geographies and architecture. Pangea is depicted by beef carpaccio squirming around a dinner plate on the backs of ants. Her relationship to food is not unique to the Brazilian experience; many cultures celebrate themselves through cooking and other domesticities. The eerie slither of the meat around the plate however was a fantastical and clever trip into surrealism, but the artist's other pieces, photographs of architecture made of radishes and toothpicks (et al.) are less inspiring.

A kaleidoscope of steel and vectored shapes, Ana Maria Tavares’ piece Airshaft (to Piranesi), 2008, is a venture from the splashy color in the collection, with its bewildering and futuristic grays and blacks, in its silvered pools of mirrors and never-ending stairways. The 3D video takes the viewer through a bizarre, metallic labyrinth, not unlike an Escher illusion or a Borgesian Labyrinth. The video oscillates between a slow descent through the nucleus of the stairwell and ascension, creating a feeling of falling vs. floating, as well as motion sickness for the equilibrium-challenged. Surrounded by mirrors, the floorless stairwells look as if you'll never hit bottom. Disorienting, but that’s the point: to express something unreal but simultaneously actual, the whirling steel life of a metropolis, with a strange and fevered velocity.

The psychological effects of Isabela Capeto’s Lucha Libre, 2008, are less blaring than Tavares’ work but equally potent. It’s a massive and dramatic tapestry of little, gold sequins and metal pendants, showing off Capeto’s skill in the handicrafts. The floral patterns are delicate and intricate with subtle pops of lime beading and surprise hints of blue embroidery. Unlike Tavare’ piece, however, Capeto celebrates spatial density with romantic and decorative attributes.

It’s all a rush, a sensory overload. If one sense isn’t fulfilled, another will be involved (to the point of abuse). From the spastic acid trip installation of assume vivid astro focus to Tomie Ohtake’s bold, strangly romantic geometries and radically abstract forms a la Mark Rothko, from the optical illusion of Lucia Koch’s photography to Erika Verzutti’s mythical fruit-animal hybrids, all the pieces are extraordinarily vibrant (!) and though they address many of the same themes, they never exhaust their impulsiveness towards the surreal.

--Jolene Torr

(Images: Marepe, Untitled; Marepe, Mariinha; Ana Maria Tavares, Airshaft (to Piranesi), 2008; Tomie Ohtake, Untitled.  All images courtesy of artists and Yerba Buena Center, SF)

Life in Tehran means several different things certainly, and I think in the West, it’s common to polarize the possible meanings based on obvious stereotypes and newswire-fueled assumptions. It’s easy that way. But in approaching this collection of modern art from Tehran, a complex intellectual tension surfaces as the artists are responding, surely, to an aggressively political and religious society but also attempting to reveal another richer layer in the story along with the symbols of alienation and fear.

In “One Day: A Collective Narrative of Tehran,” the surprising details of the mundane are explored, as one part of the story. I naturally go to politics to contextualize this, as if to say that this art is only symptomatic of the political climates; it’s not. But the questions now change to something like: well, is boredom a consequence of oppression? Is this a different type of oppression? In Ghazaleh Hedayat’s Taxiography, 2009, the artist maps out the hours spent in traffic and public transit. She drops her pen, using different colors to signify different roads and lets her hand relax and travel along the paper. This surrendering of control reminds me of the hypotrochoid art set I had as a kid, where you let your pen roll in a roulette through a stencil. The artist of course is not stenciling, but she is using the course of the road, with all its potholes and sudden traffic stops, as her guide. She seems interested in systems and in Process Art. The result is a series of realized and chaotic geographies, alike in abruptness and the capacity to puzzle. Is life really just as tedious over there?

Taraneh Hemami’s wool carpet Turning Green, 2009, is another map of dizzying geography. Tehran is the core where these convoluted tributaries meet. Like Byzantine conduits, these roads are seemingly unpredictable in every bend. The realization of another geography that’s not American, not San Franciscan, always makes me feel stupid. Yes, of course there is unfamiliar and unanticipated ground out there, I know this much. But I think it’s true that the actualization and physical mass of such a place (even through a wool carpet and its sheepy, burnt smell) is still effective and needed to reinforce that this is a real place, where real people do come from, where they inhabit.

And such a place, with all its political tension, does exist, where people have a story to tell. There’s Homayoun Askari Sirizi’s caged bird who in ancient times arbitrarily anointed kings and in modern days arbitrarily decides your fortune by picking from a choice of folded poems. The bird’s mythology is fabulous and glamorous, and so is its current career (or so you’d think for a bird of that responsibility), but the setting of the video is in a very everyday, urban city side. Cars pass. Building cast shadows. The bird tells you the meaning of life. And people go on living.

A white, vertical box stands, with breath coming from it. The holes drilled into the box represent martyrs. And people go on living. Political billboards are plastered on the sides of building or erected in public spaces. And people go on living. With so much work that needs to be commented on (and a conversation that can go deeper and deeper), I’m going to stop short at Neda Razavipour’s Find the Lost One, 2009, a video installation of a subway scene. The same video plays side by side but in one video, there’s a difference. One person has been erased. I stood, watching. I couldn’t find him or her. The artist was successful in the art of subtlety. Life’s tedium repeats, and the work is fairly literal, somber. Someone gets erased and it’s hard to tell whom; so people go on living.  I guess they have to, they must. And after watching for some time, I never found the missing person.

- Jolene Torr

(All images courtesy the artist and Intersection: Taraneh Hemami, "Turning Green," 2009, Laser cut wool carpet, 126" x 108"; Mehran Mohajer, "Tehran, Undated," 2009, C-print, 27.25"H x 27.25"W; Abbas Kowsari. "The time is 24:00. This is Tehran.," 2009, C-print, triptych, each 14.5"H x 110"W)